Economics as Ideology and Experience: Essays in Honour of Ashok Mitra Book

A high-quality collection of papers published in 1989. The theoretical target is shared and clear -- regarding the conceptual distinction between gift and money. Various authors, esp. Parry, Fuller, and Bloch, situate that distinction in longer theoretical traditions from Aristotle to Voltaire, and, of course, re-situates Marx and Mauss etc. The ethnographic examinations are rich, solid, and wide-ranging. All papers have substantial materials to speak to the variations of cultural meanings of transaction/exchange, or how people relate to "money" differently. The shared cultural background, as the authors admit, is the "Western" moral uneasiness with money, which attitude, in other cultures, could have been much more relaxed. The collection was out in 1989. I wish someone would examine ethnographers of economic anthropology who are located in metropolitan political-economic centers (such as London) in relation to mainstream economists over the century's broader economic experiments (liberalization in Asia, Latin America, etc.) and their counter-movements (and the post-socialist problem of economy.)